


Dreams Away From Here

by MercuryHomophony



Series: Behold the Field in Which I store my Headcannons (TAZ) [7]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Based on Personal Experiences, Gen, Spoilers for The Stolen Century, disassociative dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-11-29 05:23:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11434044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryHomophony/pseuds/MercuryHomophony
Summary: The hardest thing about getting 100+ years of memory back wasn’t the initial rush; and the hardest times were always in dreams.





	1. The Hardest Part

The hardest thing about getting 100+ years of memory back wasn’t the initial rush. That had been miserable, but it had only lasted a few moments, and honestly, there were bigger things happening at the time. It hadn’t been the betrayal, the heartache - that had sucked, but with the end of all existence as they knew it looming, it had been put on the back burner, and its a little hard to hold a grudge against someone who has become family for nearly 100 years, especially when you’re just so _grateful_ that you all made it out, alive and well and whole. So even that passed, too. Eventually.

No, the problem wasn’t that their memories had been taken from them. The problem was that, when you’ve spent so many years forgetting, remembering is… _new._ All the memories, coming back at once, _feel_ new, even when the six of them knew they were long distant.

And the hardest times were always in dreams.


	2. Of Waking

Magnus dreams of planes where he died.

There was always so much to do, each cycle. Wait for the Light to fall, find it, barter or beg or steal it, study it, fortify the world against the terrible, terrible thing that was coming. Magnus always felt like he had an easy role in it. He was security, and his job was to protect his crew-mates, protect the people they came across, rinse and repeat as often as necessary to beat this thing. He died sometimes, sure, maybe more than most, but he’d rather it was him than anyone else on the team. There was always something to do, and when he dreams, he’s there again, undertaking the same kinds of challenges he had for one hundred years (far longer than any human has a right to be alive, but he’s not complaining). In the planes he died, there were always people who needed help, and he can _give_ them that help, he can’t stop now. He’s doing what he knows is right, what he has to do, and there’s always one more thing, one more thing, pushing him forward.

There’s nothing like that in the waking world, these days, and when the enchanted alarm the twins made for him goes off in the morning, he hits snooze without even thinking about it, his dream-filled brain assigning it some measure of importance, creating another task in the cycle for him to complete so he can return to what’s really important… in his dreams. There’s nothing like that in the waking world, these days. Why even get up?

Magnus dreams of planes where he died. Because there, he was needed.


	3. Is Confusion

Davenport dreams of the past too, but not through the eyes of Cap’nport.

Captain Davenport of the IPRE struggles with his dreams, because he’s not himself there. One hundred years of memories have been returned to him, yes, but so has his very sense of _self._ It’s not something that easily comes back to him, after ten years of barely being able to say more than his own name. He’s nothing less than a self-reliant gnome, though, and so during the day he manages himself well enough. It’s at night, when he’s asleep, that the last ten years mingle with the hundred before them. In his dreams, he sees the planes they’ve traveled, the memories new and fresh. But the fog that’s been over him for the past decade lingers large, pulls down at him. He tries to think, but his thoughts are sluggish. Dangers loom large over the crew, _his crew,_ and he moves to shelter them, to take charge, but his limbs are heavy, and he is slow and scared and confused and Davenport, he is Davenport, he is Davenport heisDavenporthe’sDavenportdavenportdavenportdavenport he watches wordlessly as his crew falls again and again, unable to do anything as this mockery of himself. He wakes, shaken, and does his best to reassure himself of who he is, what he is capable of. But he lost so much more than memories when Fischer ate the journals, and it’s hard to be the gnome he once was.


	4. And Mistaking

Taako dreams of dust.

That’s not as accurate as he’d like it to be. He would like it if he just dreamed of dust, if the weight of one hundred years could be brushed off, blown away. But his dreams sit heavy on him. He wasn’t prepared for remembering, for _any_ of it, he hadn’t been prepared to barricade himself from the memories of all the people he’d met in those years, people who he’d started ignoring because they didn’t matter, he couldn’t _let them_ matter, he’d go insane otherwise. But now, for better or worse, those memories are back, and when he sleeps, hell, even when he meditates, he’s back in those planes, his dreams too vivid to find fault in, now that he has his sister’s memory back, now that half of his life isn’t erased, all those memories are too stark, too alive. He starts waking up, still engrossed in his dreams, unsure of which plane he’s actually on, what has and hasn’t happened already, mistaking the present as the past, safety as danger. Kravitz wakes up once to find him digging through their dresser, frantic to find something he needed fifty years ago, decades and planes away. Lup and Barry make him a coin, like the one Barry used as a lich. Now, Kravitz wakes up to find Taako awake, clutching it and staring at the wall, listening as his sister’s voice tells him where he is, what has happened, that he’s safe, he’s okay, and Kravitz gently pulls him into his arms and lets his voice sooth the wizard too. He doesn’t assume to know what Taako’s thinking, and doesn’t mention the tear tracks on his cheeks. Taako knows, though.

He wishes he would dream of dust, and not of faces past.


	5. Of The Living

Barry dreams of lightning.

He has it easier than the rest of them, he thinks. He got to be himself the most these last ten years. He’s been able to remember in bursts, and after he drinks the ichor, once that first wave of memories subsides, he remembers remembering, time and time again and again, questing, dying, remembering, reviving. Rinse and repeat. He doesn’t have the weird double-self that the rest of them do, thanks to spending ten years on and off being dead. But, this world wasn’t friendly to liches, and without Lup, he’d had so many times when he’d almost lost himself. That’s what he dreams of - those first moments, over and over, where death lifted Fischer’s influence from him, when his memories came rushing back, each time the knowledge of his failures getting worse, the situation seeming more and more hopeless - his family, his _brother-in-law_ , didn’t even know him, and Lup… Lup was no where. He had held on to his memories in the waking world, yes, but he’d had to push the darkness down for so long to do so, and now, in his dreams, he sees himself lose control, sees red lightning eat up the living shadows of his friends, sees himself become something truly terrible, because it’s all _lost_ , what if she’s just _gone_ , he can’t hold on like this-

He becomes something that is no longer Barry Bluejeans, something that stops caring, stops hurting… and in some dreams, for just a second, he’s okay with that. And that’s what scares him most of all.

When he awakes he’s alive. Lup is there holding his hand too tightly, but it means she’s _here, too_ , so he has no complaints. The dreams hurt, too, but… its better than the alternative. He’ll take it as it is.


	6. World Around You

Lup dreams about silence, and stillness.

That sounds nice, she knows, and she knows most of her family is suffering from dreams that are neither. But this isn’t tranquil peace, this is the silence of having nothing with which to scream, the stillness of someone trapped so completely that even panicked thrashing is impossible. And sure, maybe it’s kind of on her, but who would’ve guessed that the Umbra Staff would consider her the bested wizard when she died and fucking _eat her?_

She dreams of being an inanimate object, of wanting to cry and shriek and roar in fury and terror as she watches her friends, her love, her _brother_ , march down paths set for them, unknowing. She burns inside, she always has and, she thinks, always will, but with nowhere to go, the fire simply eats itself, leaving her exhausted. She longs to help, to intervene, to interact in any way with the world around her, but she is _silenced,_ and she dreams of slowly losing herself, of becoming simply a relic herself, of near-nonexistence, and fights it with everything she has. She wakes up one of two ways, on those nights. Some nights, she thrashes in her sleep and meditation, much to Barry’s misfortune, and other nights she wakes up, paralyzed, breath caught like glass in her chest as she’s _forgotten what it_ _’s like to be an elf, she’s not alive, she’s still an umbrella, she’s lost everything,_ and on all of these nights, Barry is a blessed reprieve. When she thrashes, he wakes her up, assures her that there’s nothing to fight, she’s won her struggle; and when she wakes, still as the dead, he’s trained himself to sense it, pulls her hands to his, rubs the life back into them, slowly massages her back to muscle from a magicked statue of terror. She’s having such a hard time becoming _herself_ again, and every night, she feels like these visions set her back, again and again.

And those are just her dreams.


	7. For The Dreams

Merle dreams of a room, with a table and two high-backed chairs… and a chess set.

He probably has the least of them all to remember - he spent so many of his years dead, after being in parlay with John, so when his memories come back, that familiar scene is what sticks out the most. It doesn’t help that he gets a refresher course almost immediately after his memories return, but well, what the hell can you do, right?

So, he dreams of a room. And he dreams of dying. And overall, he dreams peacefully. He dreams of chess games that he can’t quite recall, dreams of questions turned to idle conversation, dreams of a friend he had, once, maybe never, certainly never again… He’s never been one to look at the bad side of things for long, and these dreams are pleasant, in a way. Even when he dreams of dying, he knows it’s nothing personal. It hadn’t been then, it wasn’t now, when his brain replays those little moments, over and over and over again. Sometimes, he’s lucid in his sleep (probably a side-effect of some of the shit he’s been brewing as tea to help him out, but, eh), and when that happens… sometimes, sometimes he tries to change things. Little things. Making different moves, asking different questions, probing and prodding and trying to see what could have been different, because maybe things could have been different. They don’t know what happened to John, they don’t know exactly what happened to the planes within the Hunger, they don’t know a lot of things, but he thinks maybe he could know, if he wanted to, but that would mean taking a risk, and he doesn’t have any more extra lives, so he indulges in his dreams instead, pretends maybe there was something different he could have done, thinks maybe John was still redeemable, still reachable, despite everything. He sleeps well enough, but he wakes up and feels at fault, because if there was any soul that needed guidance, it was John, and despite all of Merle’s cleric-y wisdoms, he had fallen short of helping him.

Merle’s mornings are tinged with regret, but his dreams are filled with hope.


	8. You Have Forsaken.

Lucretia doesn’t dream.

She used to have nightmares, of course. Plenty of them, of all sorts, about the horrors she had faced over the last century, about the faces of her friends as she led them to their new lives (temporarily, only ever temporarily-!), about the sacrifices in Wonderland, about the suffering she had been complicit in creating in the world below.

She used to dream. But ten years of training herself not to, of working herself to exhaustion so stringent that she cannot help but to not dream, has taken its toll, and it is a small blessing to her that she cannot dream, now that things are over.

Her nightmares are during the day, as she watches her family suffer, trying to recover from this thing that she’s done. She sees the bags under the twins’ eyes, the somber look Merle bears as he slowly sips his coffee in the morning. She sees how Magnus is rarely up before noon, something he never would have tolerated before, how Barry tries his best to support those around him, even as his own expression looks haunted when he thinks no one is looking.

She sees how Davenport struggles not to fall into the position he’s held for the last ten years, and does her best to let him lead, again.

No amount of self-justification will help, not this time. Without the Staff whispering its sweet thrall into her ear, she can see her actions plainly, and even though she stands by her decisions, she knows she’s wronged them, that she cannot heal them. She cannot shield them from what she’s caused, and that is the source of her day-mares.

She tries, because it is the only thing she can do. She could leave - it would be so easy to leave, and some days, watching her family go about their day, still reeling, still recovering, she convinces herself that it would be better that way. How can they heal from what she did to them if she stays, a constant reminder? But, she never convinces herself to actually leave. She did what she had done to stop them from hurting this way in the first place, and she had caused so much more damage in the process. Her guilt is her own this time, and she cannot forsake them like she did before.

She stays. She does what little she can.

Bit by bit, things start to change. Bit by bit, her friends are coming back, and bit by bit, she supports them, while still holding them at arm’s length, afraid to get too close, afraid of them rejecting her, or, worse, of her doing _more_ harm to them.

Then, one night at dinner, Taako and Lup are cooking, Barry, Merle and Davenport are playing cards at the table, while Magnus sits nearby, whittling a block of wood into… something. Probably a duck.

Lucretia stands in the doorway, just out of sight, she thinks, and takes in the sight. It’s almost as it was, she thinks. It’s almost as if nothing happened, and her heart aches at the sight of it, because it can’t be hers again.

She doesn’t see Taako spot her, the wary, thoughtful look in his eye. She doesn’t see him lean over and whisper something to Lup, under the hiss of the simmering pot on the stove.

She has no choice but to notice when Lup turns around, facing her directly, one eyebrow raised, as a large magical hand gently but firmly bumps her out of her hiding spot and into the room. “We were wondering when you were gonna join us, Luci,” she says, gesturing to Barry, who jumps up and starts setting the table. Merle and Davenport start clearing out their game, and Magnus does his best to brush the wooden shavings onto the floor. “Ain’t really a family meal without the whole family, am I right?”

She feels frozen for a moment, as if the eyes of the Hunger are all fixated on her once again… but it’s her family, and they are all looking at her with smiles, with varying measures of curiosity, hesitancy, and… concern. She looks over at Taako, and even he, who had been arguably the most despondent over her betrayal… even he has a wan spread to his lips - not quite a smile, but something that’s on its way. She takes a careful seat at the table, and Magnus pulls her in for a brief, one-armed side hug while Lup and Taako dish out the meal. Merle winks at her from across the way, in that awkward grandfatherly way of his, and Davenport offers her a small smile. Barry pats her shoulder silently as he passes with the dishes.

She eats with them, and realizes this is the first time since the end of the world.

 

Lucretia doesn’t dream, because she’s taught herself not to. But it’s not a huge loss. Her family is alive, and together, and healing.

 

There’s nothing that dreams could offer her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And a happier note, for the ending!
> 
> Thank you all for joining me on this lovely little experiment - I got the idea when I woke up in a similar tizzy as Taako (I often wake up in the "wrong place," thanks to the vividness of my dreams) and decided to incorporate some of my dream-dysfunctions into the IPRE crew. Let me tell you, I have never projected on characters so hard, so I'm glad you enjoyed them and I managed to keep them in character!
> 
> Thank you all again for reading, and I hope you enjoy the little poem in the chapters :3  
> (If you have ideas for other shorts I could write like these, hit me up @merchomophony on Twitter, or Mercurial-Writ on Tumblr!)


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